Crim’s Newsapalooza

In anticipation, some of the major networks have already made the switch to digital broadcast. Even today, several over-the-air (OTA), cable, and satellite broadcasts can be received in HDTV with the proper antenna and tuner. Analog television sets receiving over-the-air programming will still work after that date, but will require converter boxes to change new digital broadcasts into the older analog format. Cable and satellite subscribers with analog television sets will most likely add yet another box from their service providers which converts signal for the DTV transition.

The ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready has two computer monitor video output options; a 15 pin DSub analog output port and a digital DVI port. That means if you want to hook up a computer based on this motherboard to a HDTV, you’ll need to find a DVI to HDMI converter. Luckily those converter cables are easy to find and not expensive, usually about $15 US. The ALiveNF7G-HDready has no problems playing H.264 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at resolutions of 720P, 1080i / 1080P with a minimum 2GB of RAM installed and a CPU at least as powerful as an Athlon64 X2-5200+. HDCP support within the GeForce 7050PV chipset means that you can watch copy right protected movies (virtually all HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies out there right now) at maximum resolutions.

The onboard graphics chipset is the GeForce 7050 PV which is a DirectX 9 part with Shader Model 3.0 support. There are two pixel pipelines and one vertex pipeline, with the core clock being 425MHz. Those building a media centre system for high definition playback are well catered for as the core supports VC-1, H.264 and MPEG-2 hardware acceleration as well as featuring smart scaling of low resolution vide for higher resolution displays. As this is a DX9/SM 3.0 based product it fully supports Windows Vista’s Aero interface.

The initial spike is due to me alt-tabbing between the monitoring program and PowerDVD. Overall the CPU-usage is around 30%. The quality of the playback was very good although you could notice that the noise reduction was not working as well as on the other cards.They even do a little playback test (with Planet Earth).

Western Digital’s claim of a quiet drive is indeed backed up by our acoustic measurements, though it cannot claim to be the quietest. Its idle noise measurement of just over 30dB(A) makes it a few decibels louder than both the Hitachi 7K1000 and the Samsung T166 drives which we’ve recently tested in the AnandTech labs. The score does represent nearly a 3 decibel reduction from any Western Digital drive we’ve previously tested, however, and easily bests the Seagate 750GB 7200.10.

Comparing the performance at stock speed as well as overclocked, I increased the FSB high enough so that each CPU was running at 3Ghz, additionally I pushed the E2160 a bit further to 3.3Ghz. Do note that with the E2160 the memory was running slightly faster. Overclocking was done with the stock Intel heatsink which kept the CPUs running stable even at speeds over 3Ghz.